Covert pacts between state actors, politicians, and armed and criminal non-state actors have undermined the ideal role of democracy as a regime that promotes transparency. Yet pacts and negotiations have also been tools to promote democratization and peace. This essay explores the complex relationship between democracy and criminal violence, examining how pacts between politicians, violent and criminal actors, and state agents have undermined democracy. It also explores whether, under some circumstances, negotiations can act as a tool to promote peace and democracy.
Declining Trust in Democracy
The end of the first quarter of the 21st century has seen an unprecedented expansion in crime and diversification of illicit economies across Latin America. The region’s most established democracies (Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay) are experiencing growing problems with crime that although not comparable to the scale of violence and criminal economies in countries like Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico, have made concerns about crime even more ubiquitous than they were in the early 1990s. Crime and violence vary significantly across the region, and current trends are more complex than what prominent cases and headlines would suggest. For example, several countries experienced declines in homicides—though not necessarily in general crime or violence —over the past five years. Nevertheless, it is obvious that criminal violence continues to undermine trust in democracy. For example, it is no surprise that Ecuador experienced a sharp decline of trust in institutions (which was already low and steadily declining since the mid 2010s) between 2021 and 2023 as the country sank into an extreme public security crisis.
Criminal violence threatens democracy by undermining trust in institutions and increasing corruption that deteriorates the quality of services and protection that citizens receive. Critically, it erodes the protection of civilian liberties, both through crime and violence perpetrated by criminal and armed actors, and through state actions to combat, or collude, with criminality. Trust in democracy has been steadily deteriorating since 2016 when the Latin America Public Opinion survey first identified a sharp decline in support for democracy from 68% in 2004 when this survey was first launched, to 58% in 2016, trust was 59% in 2023 (Lupu et al. 2023). The actual levels of democracy have also deteriorated, although to a lesser extent than in other regions of the world (Nord et al. 2024). Despite this deterioration, by the end of 2024 sixty four percent of Latin Americans still lived under regimes that we can consider electoral democracies (Nord et al. 2024), a proportion that is much higher than all other regions in the world except for Western Europe and North America. In this context, Arias and Goldstein’s (2010) definition of violent democracies still describes a persistent reality that has become even starker in countries such as Mexico and Ecuador. Key tenets of formal democracy, particularly electoral competition, have not reduced violence, and organized crime and violence can be functional for plural electoral competition. Pacts between politicians and violent actors have undermined the meaning of quintessential democratic processes. These pacts have also further undermined trust in police institutions, which although not part of the democratic process per se, were expected to become more accountable and respectful of rights as countries transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.
Nevertheless, the relationship between criminality and democracy remains complex. The existence and impact of pacts between states and criminal actors also depends on other factors: the strength of checks and balances and judiciary institutions, the levels of state cohesion or fragmentation, and overall state capacity. Furthermore, corrupt pacts are not exclusive to democratic regimes. However, the impact of corrupt pacts on violence varies across different types of political regimes, in ways that can wrongly enforce perceptions that limiting some aspects of democracy can be an effective way of combating crime.
Democratization, Corrupt Pacts, and Increasing Violence
Mexico is the most prominent recent example of how democratization can multiply the channels through which criminal actors and state officials collude, and of how this collusion can be a crucial driver of violence. In Mexico, elections have become a critical arena of criminal competition. According to Sandra Ley (2018), between 1995 and 2012, more than 350 public authorities, party activists, and candidates were victims of violence by criminal groups. This number grew exponentially between 2018 and 2025 to 2,299 attacks (threats, murders, disappearances, kidnappings) against government workers or people involved in political campaigns, largely due to struggles for control of licit and illicit markets and territory (Votar Entre Balas 2025). In this context, it is difficult for citizens to determine whether elections are a channel of representation or a vehicle for criminality. The limits between state and crime have become extremely difficult to identify, as is painfully illustrated in the many reports of forced disappearance involving state agents.
Yet, Mexico best exemplifies how democratic channels alone do not create the pacts that undermine trust in democracy. Before democratization, the country was characterized by high-level collusion between state and criminal actors, which in the context of a centralized and semi-authoritarian state enabled effective protection pacts. These state-sponsored protection rackets kept certain forms of violence under control while enabling the operation of criminal activities and other less visible forms of violence (Snyder and Durán-Martínez 2009). As Trejo and Ley (2020) argue, the emergence of gray zones of criminality—where state actors and criminals overlap to enable the operation of illicit activities—was not the product of democratization. Rather, such arrangements emerged under authoritarian or hybrid regimes, even if their existence became evident in the context of democracy.
Pacts, State Cohesion, and the Authoritarian Spell
Collusion pacts between state and criminal actors facilitate the operation of illicit activities; state officials protect criminal and violent actors from the law in exchange for financial benefits, political support, mutually beneficial homicide reduction (Durán-Martínez 2018) or even the advancement of large-scale resource extraction (Paley 2015). In many occasions, state actors directly operate (and benefit from) these illicit activities. These types of pacts exist across many different contexts, but their organization, scale, and consequences vary. When pacts involve cohesive state actors and a few criminal groups, some forms of lethal violence decrease, but when states are fragmented and criminal groups proliferate and compete against each other, violence tends to increase.
Collusion pacts between states and non-violent actors in democratizing contexts can lead to more lethal violence. Conversely, collusion pacts in authoritarian states can reduce some forms of lethal violence. This can create the illusion that top-down corrupt pacts or authoritarian repression campaigns can be the solution to violent democracies. Yet, the relationship between crime, violence, and democracy is underpinned by complex and nuanced power arrangements, and it is not zero sum. This relationship is mediated by the fragmentation of state actors and institutions. Regime type and state fragmentation are not the same thing, and authoritarian states are not always cohesive. In Venezuela, for example, the deeper deterioration of democratic checks and balances over the past decade, and the proliferation of criminal actors that collude with state actors, has not generated forms of stable protection that could reduce violence, as occurred during the dominant period of the PRI in Mexico (Hanson, Smilde, and Zubillaga 2022). This is due to the fragmentation of the authoritarian state. By contrast, authoritarian states with centralized power structures can more effectively establish top-down protection rackets that regulate—but do not eliminate—criminality. A case in point is Nicaragua, a country that was for some time touted as an exception to the high levels of homicide in the Northern Triangle of Central America. There, in parallel to more benign factors such as community policing, stable protection arrangements of the drug trade by the elite classes reduced violence. These arrangements became possible as the rule of the FSLN became increasingly centralized and co-governance agreements with the opposition allowed the government to control illicit actors and economies (Rocha, Rodgers, and Weegels 2023). Since 2018, cracks within the ruling elites and economic crises have led the state to double down on repression, reorganizing an already semi-authoritarian state, making the consequences of collusion pacts more evident.
The apparent success in reducing homicides in El Salvador, which has occurred as democratic checks and balances have been undermined and radically repressive anti-gang policies have been implemented, has led many citizens to believe that authoritarianism and limitations to democracy can help better control crime. Yet the same logic that explains why effective state-sponsored protection rackets cannot be established in all authoritarian states highlights one reason (among many others, as explained by Cruz in this FORUM) why authoritarian repression is not an effective tool to reduce crime. Repressive policies may appear to reduce crime when different levels of state authority are well-coordinated and party fragmentation is limited. This is the case in El Salvador, a small country where political factions have been disciplined under the Nuevas Ideas party, and different branches of power have effectively been consolidated under the command of the executive branch. This type of cohesive security apparatus—and thus, such outcomes of repression—could not be achieved in places like Ecuador where the electoral landscape is extremely fragmented.
Collusion pacts aimed at reducing violence, as well as repressive policies and militarization, inevitably increase violence in contexts marked by state and criminal fragmentation. The apparent “success” of repression in El Salvador stands in contrast to its failures under fragmented authoritarian (e.g. Venezuela) and democratic regimes (e.g. Mexico). In Venezuela, iron-fist policies have been implemented repeatedly without reducing homicides. In Mexico, the declaration of a War on Drugs that escalated militarization under Felipe Calderón in 2006, has continued under his successors Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, trapping the country in spirals of violence and criminal governance.
Pacts, Democracy, and State Capacity
The relationship between pacts, democracies, and criminal violence is also mediated by state capacity. Take Ecuador and Chile. In both countries, the proliferation of violent events and overall insecurity are related to the fragmentation of criminal and state actors in a context of growing illicit activities, thus creating multiple channels for collusion pacts that are fragmented and unstable. In Chile, although homicide rates remain below epidemic levels and the lowest in Latin America, they increased by 30% between 2022 and 2023. Drug related violence has also increased near the northern border with Peru and Bolivia. In Ecuador, homicide rates are now the highest in the region, and 2024 finished with the second highest homicide rate in history (38.8, with the highest recorded in 2023 with 47 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants). Despite a slight decline in 2024, the country remains engulfed in a profound deterioration of security that has included notable events of public violence: the assassination of a presidential candidate, decapitations in prisons and on the street, bomb explosions, and the armed storming of a TV station.
Insecurity, fear, and discontent with democracy have increased steadily in both countries. Nevertheless, the scale of violence and its impact on citizens is significantly lower in Chile, reflecting its state’s historically higher capacity for reducing violence and for implementing horizontal checks and balances (Luna 2016). In Ecuador, by contrast, the explosion of violence occurred as the state’s capacity diminished and criminal actors increased in power and number. Ecuador’s historically weak state expanded its capacity under a commodity boom and a renewed agenda of expansion in state services and investment between 2006 and 2016. This expansion declined rapidly after 2014 as the commodity boom that funded a prior expansion in bureaucracies and service provisions during the government of Rafael Correa receded. During President Lenin Moreno’s tenure (2017-2021) key security agencies and state bureaucracies were dismantled at a moment when criminal groups and illicit activities were expanding. This lack of state capacity contributed to make collusion more fragmented, unstable and frequent, and reduced the ability of the state to control growing violence. Polarization, political fragmentation, and democratic deterioration are present in both countries, but the scale of the effect is much higher under a fragile Ecuadorian state.
Cynicism and the Reproduction of Violent Democracies
Violent democracies nurture demands for policies that undermine civilian liberties but that are perceived to be more effective. The reality and perception of corruption and collusion undermines trust in elections and in institutions, and increases the appeal of authoritarian and populist responses. Paradoxically, the lack of trust in democratic institutions also feeds legal cynicism that, rather than undermining democracy entirely, reproduces violent democracies.
There are caveats in the relationship between citizen trust and the level of democracy. In 2023, 42% of the population in Latin America justified a coup to reduce crime, a percentage that has grown over the past ten years. Still, 52% of the population did not support a coup to reduce crime, and the amount of support for the undemocratic option to reduce crime is still lower than between 2004 and 2008. This suggests that citizens’ ideas, perceptions, and experiences with democracy in relation to crime are complex. Despite the clear deterioration and distortion of electoral competition associated with illegal actors and markets, citizens in some countries where the participation of illegal actors in elections is widespread still trust elections at above average levels for Latin America. This is the case in Brazil or Mexico. The fact that these are also countries where democracy has deteriorated suggest, among other things, that citizens in different parts of the same country can experience democracy differently. Perceptions of corruption remain incredibly high, creating ambivalent relations with democracy where democratic institutions can simultaneously serve some of its ideal functions—simultaneously protecting some citizens while ignoring others—while also maintaining channels for the mutual instrumentalization of violent and political actors.
The radical difference in perceptions about democracy between El Salvador and Colombia illustrates how violent democracies not only undermine trust in democracy but also distort the definition and perception of what constitutes a democracy. In El Salvador, trust in democracy is the highest in the region, even as both the competitive nature of elections and the protection of civil liberties are undermined. In Colombia, by contrast, trust in democracy has declined since 2016. This decline is paradoxical as it has occurred in a new era of democracy ushered by the signing of a peace agreement with the FARC, a de-escalation of the armed conflict, an increase in electoral competition, and a reduction of electoral violence. This lack of trust reflects the precarious and vulnerable nature of security and economic gains. Indeed, conflict indicators started deteriorating again around 2020. Nonetheless it is puzzling since Colombia is a more stable democracy and a stronger state than two decades ago. However, decades of coexistence between criminality, violence, and elections have subverted the inner workings of democratic channels of representation.
Pacts to Build Peaceful Democracies
I have discussed how the coexistence of violent actors and democratic practices, and the pacts between violent and state actors interact, subvert the meaning and functioning of democracy. Yet, other forms of interest negotiation and pacts were crucial in ushering democracy at the onset of the third wave of democratization. Pacts played an important role in ending military dictatorships in the Southern Cone, and peace processes were crucial in ending civil wars in Central America. Can new forms of negotiation help break cycles of criminal violence in countries like Colombia or Mexico, or facilitate a transition to democracy in Venezuela? As I have argued in another article in LASA Forum (Durán-Martínez 2022), publicly negotiating with criminal actors can be a way of reducing violence while addressing root causes of conflict and criminality. Covert pacts and collusion constantly undermine democracy in violent democracies. Thus, public pacts and negotiations could increase accountability and transparency over complex power transactions that often emerge to reduce some consequences of criminality. Pacts can therefore function as peace-building strategies. But pacts also entail risks and dilemmas, can be unstable, and can strengthen the violent or undemocratic actors they purport to eliminate. For instance, pacted transitions to democracy where authoritarian actors played a more active role were also more likely to leave those responsible for suffering and violence embedded within the system and less likely to face justice. And undemocratic and violent actors that are not effectively brought to justice and demobilized can perpetuate authoritarian legacies, criminal practices, and violent behavior (Trejo, Albarracin, and Tiscornia 2018). The unfulfilled promises of peace agreements can further undermine citizen trust, as has been the case in Central America. Still, public dialogue and negotiation can provide bases to craft broad social contracts that acknowledge the complex social, political, and economic realities perpetuating criminal violence and violent democracies. But no policy will be enough without tackling interconnected social, political, cultural, and economic factors, and addressing the dual face of a rule of law that can be brutally wielded against low level offenders but not effectively used to hold high level protagonists of collusion pacts accountable.